The disclosure relates generally to camera imaging, and more specifically to exposure control of a three-dimensional (3D), 360-degree camera system.
Virtual reality systems capture images and/or video of an environment with one or more cameras. The images and/or video captured by the cameras are reconstructed to create a virtual reality that a user can interact with. The configuration of the one or more cameras impacts the quality of the images captured and the ability to reconstruct the images for a seamless virtual reality experience. Hence, the configuration of the cameras and lower quality captured images can adversely affect a user's virtual reality experience.
Conventional 360 degree cameras operate by stitching a plurality of frames together into a single 360 degree frame. Each frame may be subject to different lighting conditions which can result in different exposure settings (e.g., aperture, shutter speed, film speed, gain, etc.) for one or more of the frames. The differences in exposure settings may result in an inferior 360-degree image generated using the frames having different exposure settings. For example, brightness of the 360-degree image may vary between portions associated with different frames, differences in shutter speed may cause moving objects to blur in some portions of the image, differences in aperture may cause depth of field to vary in the 360-degree image, and differences in gain may cause some portions of the 360-degree image to have excessive noise.